Our industry-focused products are based on knowing how much every service costs at every healthcare provider. It's the underpinning of our products.
We also post a lot of the rates publicly in a consumer-friendly searchable format, but we don't charge any money for that. But this data will let us greatly expand the scope of that free service.
Thanks! So far, so good. We don't sell anything to consumers. Our products are aimed at the healthcare industry which lets us post information for consumers for free and we have pretty good product-market fit.
Obligatory "if anyone is interested in joining a fast growing, series A company doing impactful work, hit up our careers page!"
Interesting, I'm curious since you're in the industry, why do you think medical tourism has never taken off in a big way in the U.S.? I feel like I saw more people willing to go to Poland or Ukraine for things like dental work when I lived in Europe than people in the U.S. willing to go to Mexico or some other destination.
The US is really, really large and many people living there have never left it. There's also a belief that US healthcare is the gold standard (which is probably true at the very high end, but not necessarily on average).
In other words, it's a hard sell to convince a factory worker to travel 5-10 hours on a plane to a place they have no familiarity with to get what they believe to be inferior treatment. They might not even have a passport.
This is much less of an issue in Europe where countries are tiny and almost everyone travels between them on a regular basis.
Also, medical tourism is mostly limited to what the industry calls Shoppable Services - outpatient treatments that are not emergent/not life threatening. There is a bit of a cottage industry in Mexico for some services, like bariatric surgery for obesity or dental work, but it isn't a huge volume. The really expensive stuff in the US is emergency treatment which you can't shop for anyway.
All that said, I think the interest in buying prescriptions from overseas has never been higher.
Anecdotally, most of the people in my circle of friends and family are perfectly satisfied with what we get locally. If you have adequate insurance and no major medical issues, you don't save much by flying down to Mexico. I do have some extended family that have gone to Mexico for treatment, however, mostly of the dental variety. But it was major reconstruction, so it was worth the effort.
I do remember reading a story a couple years back where an insurance company paid for their customer to fly to Mexico, flew down a US orthopedic surgeon, and paid him pretty well for his services. The cost of the flights, surgeon, and medical facility in Mexico were significantly less than it would cost them in the US, so everybody won except the US hospital. As I recall, the hospital in Mexico was collocated with a resort, so it was a nice place to recuperate as well.
Not sure how common that really is, though, stories like that make the news for a reason.
I want my medical providers to be local to me so they’re liable to my local community. I also want to keep my organs and have insurance cover the costs.
I was guessing it was this bit at the bottom of their landing page:
> Are you a transparent provider or payer?
> There is a market for transparency. Let patients find you by claiming
> your provider page and listing your services. It only takes 10 minutes.
But following through that link says it is a free program.
We build products that help healthcare providers and insurance companies broker contracts between themselves based on actual market information instead of guessing at prices. The goal is to drive down prices by making the market more efficient.
Part of that is assuming that prices will be public, so we encourage them to claim their own page and take control of the rates listed there.
